Recently two good friends of mine responded to the blog in personal emails.
One of them is a psychotherapist, who spoke of my "struggle to access joy and entitlement, which is always there, but is now further strained by this pain, the extent of which I try to imagine."
She is telling me that I always had to struggle to access joy and entitlement, which I think is true, and that our tragic loss has made that psychological problem much more difficult. However, in the past month or so, I find myself looking forward to doing things.
In general, I think that bereavement or other kinds of loss (severe injury resulting in loss of a limb or of sight or hearing, for example) doesn't erase the problems one had before the loss. The huge new problem might eclipse the older, smaller ones for a while, it might put them in a new perspective, but it doesn't get rid of them or make them easier to solve.
On the other hand, one is also "entitled" to work on the old problems even while trying to cope with bereavement. Indeed, if one doesn't, one could collapse under all that weight.
The therapist's husband asked about the rest of the family, wondering especially how our younger daughter is coping, an insightful question. Each member of the family had his or her own relationship with Asher, and each of us has to resolve that relationship with him now in a one-sided process.
Yesterday we had a moving visit: one of Asher's elementary school teachers, Miriam Dekel, came to visit with a little packet of photographs from the second grade. It happens that we run into Miriam frequently, because we go to a lot of the same movies at the Cinematheque, and she always asks about Asher. She was shocked and distraught when Judith told her what had happened, and we were touched that she had such strong and positive memories of Asher, who was not exactly a model pupil.
The past is not erased when a person dies.
We are enriched when people share their memories of Asher with us.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Picking up the Pieces and Reassembling Them
Many people undergo shattering losses like ours, events that divide their lives into Before and After, events that change them from people who thought of themselves as fortunate to people who may continue to fortunate in many respects, but who have lost someone precious and important to them.
The challenge is to go on, not as before, certainly, but not to collapse and give up on life. We gradually pick up the pieces and put them back together. But what we reconstruct can't possibly be the same as what we were before - unless we live in denial, the other side of collapse.
The loss leaves the problems and difficulties one had before the loss intact. If I was neurotic with conflicted emotions about aspects of my life - and who is not? - that's unchanged, perhaps exacerbated by bereavement. Except that maybe one gains a certain perspective: how can I worry about being a few kilos overweight when my son has fallen to his death in Peru?
The imperative is three-fold: (1) dealing with the grief, which means (2) being kind to oneself (though I don't know how I would handle that if I had been responsible for Asher's death through negligence), and (3) reconstructing oneself and one's life.
The moral imperative, if one chooses to recognize it and is capable of responding to it, connected with any life experience is to use it to become a better person. Can it make me a more loving, compassionate person? The other direction is to become selfish: such a terrible thing happened to me, that I'm allowed to do anything! Being "kind" to oneself with a vengeance.
Something in me rebels against using the terrible thing that happened to Asher to improve myself, to benefit by it in any way. However, I realize that's a silly response. Any possible gain is totally offset by the loss, if one can quantify this sort of thing.
Those of us who have lost loved ones - and by a certain age, that category becomes universal - live on, as it were, with a constant undertone of sadness. But one needn't wear it on one's sleeve like a black armband.
I've decided to maintain a separate blog for things unconnected with the topic of our loss, the way I relate to people who don't know about it - but is anything really unconnected?
The challenge is to go on, not as before, certainly, but not to collapse and give up on life. We gradually pick up the pieces and put them back together. But what we reconstruct can't possibly be the same as what we were before - unless we live in denial, the other side of collapse.
The loss leaves the problems and difficulties one had before the loss intact. If I was neurotic with conflicted emotions about aspects of my life - and who is not? - that's unchanged, perhaps exacerbated by bereavement. Except that maybe one gains a certain perspective: how can I worry about being a few kilos overweight when my son has fallen to his death in Peru?
The imperative is three-fold: (1) dealing with the grief, which means (2) being kind to oneself (though I don't know how I would handle that if I had been responsible for Asher's death through negligence), and (3) reconstructing oneself and one's life.
The moral imperative, if one chooses to recognize it and is capable of responding to it, connected with any life experience is to use it to become a better person. Can it make me a more loving, compassionate person? The other direction is to become selfish: such a terrible thing happened to me, that I'm allowed to do anything! Being "kind" to oneself with a vengeance.
Something in me rebels against using the terrible thing that happened to Asher to improve myself, to benefit by it in any way. However, I realize that's a silly response. Any possible gain is totally offset by the loss, if one can quantify this sort of thing.
Those of us who have lost loved ones - and by a certain age, that category becomes universal - live on, as it were, with a constant undertone of sadness. But one needn't wear it on one's sleeve like a black armband.
I've decided to maintain a separate blog for things unconnected with the topic of our loss, the way I relate to people who don't know about it - but is anything really unconnected?
Friday, July 11, 2008
Ups and Downs
On some days, for no discernible reason, I am oppressed with grief, constantly aware that we have lost a vital and exciting presence in our family, a delightful, annoying, exciting, frustrating, loving, belligerent, generous, impulsive, sensitive person, and on other days I feel rather normal, though the underlying sadness never goes away.
Fortunately, I manage to be enthusiastic about some of the things I do. I'm reading Vikram Seth's monster novel, A Suitable Boy, 1,400 pages about India in the early 1950s, and I'm fully involved in the lives of his brilliantly conceived characters. For some time now I hadn't been able to enjoy fiction, one of the mainstays of my life as long as I can remember myself, so A Suitable Boy is a welcome intrusion into my life.
Part of the reason for my aversion to fiction is connected to our loss - either it seems shallow, or else it is painfully connected to what we're feeling - and part of it may be connected to my age and experience. I've already read a great many novels, and the new ones that I read don't surprise or edify me all that much. But for me reading a book (or series of books) has always been a kind of project, and finishing a book has always given me a feeling of accomplishment, so not being involved in a reading project was another emptiness in my life, an echo of the big emptiness.
Music still involves me, as does my new passion: pottery.
I'm finally bringing some finished pieces home, including one clumsy, misshapen, heavy little cup with a poorly formed, poorly proportioned handle, and I've begun drinking from it, with great love for it.
I also can get involved in movies, which is fortunate, because the Jerusalem Film Festival just opened last night. Earlier in the week, Judith and I saw a DVD of Lust, Caution, the Ang Lee thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai during World War II - nearly three hours of slow-moving drama, punctuated by scenes of intense lust, which I found difficult to watch, because they fascinated me, aroused me, and repelled me.
The sexual partners are a sadistic police minister, a convincingly evil man, a collaborator with the Japanese, and the young woman who has infiltrated his life in order to arrange his assassination. Her sexual enslavement to him is as real as her political and moral enmity. His sexual bondage to her, which began with an ugly, brutal rape but turned into an obsession, also functions in an area of his life separate from the rest of it, deeply contradictory to it in some ways.
The next morning I looked for reviews of the film on the web and saw that US reviewers hated it, but British reviewers liked it, and I went with the Brits.
For me the lesson of the film is partly the way the pieces of our lives - emotional, political, intellectual - can be separate from one another. People are or can be inconsistent and illogical: two or more contradictory positions can be true at the same time in our psyches.
The movie I went to see on the opening night of the film festival was a perfect exemplar of the movie-festival genre: a Swedish movie - set in a freezing landscape - about an overweight adolescent whose only interest in life is ping pong. Who would go to see such a film except during a film festival?
On my way home, as I started walking up a steep street, I heard the motor of a car running around the corner, and I saw headlights. I moved to the side of the street, to keep out of the way, and as I turned the corner, I saw a tall young man with long hair get into the passenger seat of a non-descript, oldish white car, and it drove off, coming uncomfortably close to me.
Five steps later I saw what the two young men had been up to: the window of an old Renault Cleo had been smashed. By the time I realized that I'd happened on a getaway, the white car was well out of sight, and I had no chance of seeing its license number. I called the police on my cell phone to report the crime, and the woman on duty asked me to stay there until a patrol car came, which I did.
It wasn't until I was home, after the police came and called out the owner of the car, that I realized how lucky I had been. If I had come up the street half a minute earlier, I would have caught the young men in the act, and who knows that they would have done to me? I might have been run over, knifed, shot, or beaten up and robbed.
The one thought that keeps going through my mind, about Asher, is how his accidental death was an example of terribly bad luck. So many things could have prevented it. The fortunate timing that saved me from possible violence could have saved Asher from the fall that ended his life.
Fortunately, I manage to be enthusiastic about some of the things I do. I'm reading Vikram Seth's monster novel, A Suitable Boy, 1,400 pages about India in the early 1950s, and I'm fully involved in the lives of his brilliantly conceived characters. For some time now I hadn't been able to enjoy fiction, one of the mainstays of my life as long as I can remember myself, so A Suitable Boy is a welcome intrusion into my life.
Part of the reason for my aversion to fiction is connected to our loss - either it seems shallow, or else it is painfully connected to what we're feeling - and part of it may be connected to my age and experience. I've already read a great many novels, and the new ones that I read don't surprise or edify me all that much. But for me reading a book (or series of books) has always been a kind of project, and finishing a book has always given me a feeling of accomplishment, so not being involved in a reading project was another emptiness in my life, an echo of the big emptiness.
Music still involves me, as does my new passion: pottery.
I'm finally bringing some finished pieces home, including one clumsy, misshapen, heavy little cup with a poorly formed, poorly proportioned handle, and I've begun drinking from it, with great love for it.
I also can get involved in movies, which is fortunate, because the Jerusalem Film Festival just opened last night. Earlier in the week, Judith and I saw a DVD of Lust, Caution, the Ang Lee thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai during World War II - nearly three hours of slow-moving drama, punctuated by scenes of intense lust, which I found difficult to watch, because they fascinated me, aroused me, and repelled me.
The sexual partners are a sadistic police minister, a convincingly evil man, a collaborator with the Japanese, and the young woman who has infiltrated his life in order to arrange his assassination. Her sexual enslavement to him is as real as her political and moral enmity. His sexual bondage to her, which began with an ugly, brutal rape but turned into an obsession, also functions in an area of his life separate from the rest of it, deeply contradictory to it in some ways.
The next morning I looked for reviews of the film on the web and saw that US reviewers hated it, but British reviewers liked it, and I went with the Brits.
For me the lesson of the film is partly the way the pieces of our lives - emotional, political, intellectual - can be separate from one another. People are or can be inconsistent and illogical: two or more contradictory positions can be true at the same time in our psyches.
The movie I went to see on the opening night of the film festival was a perfect exemplar of the movie-festival genre: a Swedish movie - set in a freezing landscape - about an overweight adolescent whose only interest in life is ping pong. Who would go to see such a film except during a film festival?
On my way home, as I started walking up a steep street, I heard the motor of a car running around the corner, and I saw headlights. I moved to the side of the street, to keep out of the way, and as I turned the corner, I saw a tall young man with long hair get into the passenger seat of a non-descript, oldish white car, and it drove off, coming uncomfortably close to me.
Five steps later I saw what the two young men had been up to: the window of an old Renault Cleo had been smashed. By the time I realized that I'd happened on a getaway, the white car was well out of sight, and I had no chance of seeing its license number. I called the police on my cell phone to report the crime, and the woman on duty asked me to stay there until a patrol car came, which I did.
It wasn't until I was home, after the police came and called out the owner of the car, that I realized how lucky I had been. If I had come up the street half a minute earlier, I would have caught the young men in the act, and who knows that they would have done to me? I might have been run over, knifed, shot, or beaten up and robbed.
The one thought that keeps going through my mind, about Asher, is how his accidental death was an example of terribly bad luck. So many things could have prevented it. The fortunate timing that saved me from possible violence could have saved Asher from the fall that ended his life.
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